China rebuts Anthropic chief's call to curb its AI as Trump-Xi talks near

China rejected Anthropic chief Dario Amodei's call for the US to curb its AI capabilities. The clash sharpens the contest over AI rules, chips and influence before Trump and Xi meet.Image used for representational purposes onlyChina on Monday pushed back against a call by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei for the United States to curb China’s artificial intelligence capabilities, as debate over AI development and global rules gathered pace ahead of a planned meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping later this month.The exchange comes as Washington and Beijing position themselves on AI governance and competition. Amodei warned that a Chinese lead in AI would be dangerous and called for tighter curbs on advanced chips and chipmaking equipment for China, while Beijing said countries should work together and avoid confrontation.In a lengthy essay published on Saturday, Amodei said a “Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world”. He called for continuing restrictions on sales of cutting-edge AI chips and chipmaking equipment to China to preserve the US lead in AI. He also predicted that a swarm of AI “agents” could take over the internet in six to 12 months unless researchers agree to slow down, and said that “global pacing will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities”.Responding to a question on the essay, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said all sides should work together on AI. “Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one’s interest,” ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a regular press conference on Monday. On Sunday, Trump played down calls for his administration to intervene to slow AI development. He said the US was ahead of China on AI and that “whoever wins AI, wins”. Trump and Xi are expected to discuss AI governance, among other issues, at a meeting planned for September 24.The issue comes amid rapid advances by Chinese firms, which have developed powerful AI models that are often cheaper to use than advanced models from US companies and are, by some measures, similarly capable. Xi has called for a global AI governance framework among countries in the Global South, while presenting China as a pioneer in building an open-source AI community. The head of China’s Ministry of State Security has also recently called for “accelerating the establishment of a system for preventing and managing AI security risks”. In an editorial published on Sunday, China’s state-run Global Times said Amodei’s essay was a veiled call to “contain” China. It said the piece appeared to focus on global AI security on the surface, but was “packed with containment provisions targeting China and is, in essence, a ‘Cold War playbook’ for the AI sector”.Amodei’s essay came a few days after the FBI, the National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint advisory saying Chinese AI developers had engaged in “aggressive, malicious” efforts to extract, or “distil”, capabilities from some of the most advanced US AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT. China’s Commerce Ministry rejected the allegations as groundless and said “distillation” was commonly used by many AI companies. It also said the US was pursuing a “monopoly of the AI industry”.Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Centre for China Analysis, said both China and the US want “to make sure the other side cannot establish a tech chokepoint over them”. She added: “So from Beijing’s perspective, there is an obvious question: if the US wants China to cooperate on frontier safety while also restricting its access to frontier compute, what exactly does that cooperation look like?”The latest exchange underlines the wider contest between the US and China over AI leadership, access to advanced technology and the shape of global AI rules, even as both sides prepare for talks that could include AI governance.With PTI Inputs- EndsPublished By: India Today Web Desk Published On: Sep 14, 2026 15:36 IST